Recent reads

I was on vacation in Chicago all last week, and read about a book a day. Here are the things I read on the plane, in town, and since I've been back:

1. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: I often hear this cited as peoples' favorite Vonnegut, and I can see why. This book came into my possession as partial recompense for babysittery. It had a much shorter timeline than many of his other books (maybe 3 days?) and happened in mostly chronological order. And I think the climax of the book was amazing SPOILERS SPOILER ALERT when Hoover reads Trout's book and confirms what we all secretly think: that God put everyone else, every machine, every star in the heavens, there for our own benefit, so that he could watch our reactions and be amused.

I also like the meta-narrator in this one, especially with Vonnegut's descriptions of his fears of turning out like his mother (who he described as having "declined to go on living" in one of his forwards.)

Not my favorite of his (that would be either Hocus Pocus or Deadeye Dick) but I definitely understand the reputation it has earned.

2. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: I think I first read this in early high school, maybe 9th grade or so. It's long been a favorite of mine, back before I just read and liked stuff without really understanding why I liked it (which I kind of miss). And the problem of that being, now that I've washed a lot of my life away with reading, analyzing, classrooms, etc., I start to see some of the flaws in my favorite works: for example, holy crap is Catch-22 adverb-heavy. Seriously, like, every single line of dialogue is appended with sneeringly, magnificently, haughtily. But the more I think about it, the more I realize it must be a conscious style choice, because a) it's so flipping obvious, and repetitive and b) despite said repetition, I can't ever remember him using the same adverb twice. Which, considering the book is like, 400+ pages, is pretty impressive in and of himself.

Generally this book has stood up, however, and it has re-acquainted me with how much I love the chaplain. I yearn for him tragically.

3. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Graeme-Smith: Okay, so this was written by the same guy who wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which was a pretty hysterical book in a novelty sort of way. Obviously it would take great imagination to write something like that, but very little new writing actually took place, and I'm not sure if it's the kind of thing people will still be reading in 10 years.

Not so Abraham Lincoln. Imagine a world where vampires exist, in the Byronic mode: mysterious, dangerous, almost unknowable. Most of them are greedy, gratuitious monsters who are breeding slaves for food, but a few of them loathe their own kind, and are looking for the right human being to help them hold back the tide of human abuse.

Enter young Lincoln, whose mother slowly wastes away and eventually dies of "milk poisoning," thought to be caused by drinking bad milk. Of course, she actually was slowly poisoned after Lincoln's wastrel father entered into a Faustian pact with a local vampire and couldn't pay up. Thereafter, Lincoln dedicates his life to tracking and killing vampires. It's his motivation for everything he does: going into politics, running for president...he is even assassinated by a vampire.

This book is AWESOME. I read it basically all in one sitting, and realized afterwards that that was a huge mistake. It's the kind of book that deserves to be stretched out, to have time taken on it. It's wildly imaginative, weirdly factually correct, and surprisingly touching.

3. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace: This trip allowed me to rekindle my love affair with Wallace. I bought both this book and a biography/travelogue on him (more on that later), and plus finding a kindred spirit in Jack Joslin, who also wanted me to mention that he is good-looking and single. Not to mention an article in Paste Magazine where a superfan compiled an exhaustive audio archive (found here: http://www.sonn-d-robots.com/dfw/ ), it's been a pretty PoMo week for me.

And this book is deliciously fantastic: It contains my favorite essay ever, "E Unibus Pluram" http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf ", a treatise on how irony, especially in television, is crippling American communication and the sincerity within. It completely changed the way I viewed interpersonal communication, especially among the young, especially on the internet (which, given that this was written in I think '97, makes the latter application eerily prescient).

Quote: "And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.""

The titular essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," refers to Harper's magazine sending Wallace out on assignment on a seven-day cruise on a luxury liner. In this, out of all the essays, I think you really get a sense of the man's demons: that he was so relentlessly analyzing, thinking, overthinking, and searching for hidden metaphor and meaning that he essentially didn't know how to shut it off and just see a cruise as a cruise, the way that everyone else on the ship did, instead of some sort of hulking symbol of cheating death. He speaks at length of the innate despair that the experience brings him, in everything from being surrounded by the ocean to the brochure for the cruise itself:

"An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair."

Jack also said that this particular essay is probably the funniest thing he's ever read, and I don't disagree with that, either. It's a lot of things, simply.

Okay more later!